Probably not, although I imagine most of the common negative outcomes of sociopathy would have been screened off by the fact that I’m an adult with established habits and therefore am unlikely to develop (e.g.) a pattern of casual theft. Sympathy’s there for a reason; if I didn’t have the instinct I’d still be able to solve social coordination problems, but I’d be missing a heuristic that’d allow me to do it much faster in the 80% case. My impression is that that would cause more problems than it’s likely to solve, given that I’m not in a field like law or business where sociopathy would give me a direct comparative advantage.
I’d probably take a pill that reduced my sympathetic instincts rather than eliminating them entirely, though, or allowed me to selectively disable them. I’ve got the feeling that they’re more than optimally active in my particular case.
Probably not, although I imagine most of the common negative outcomes of sociopathy would have been screened off by the fact that I’m an adult with established habits and therefore am unlikely to develop (e.g.) a pattern of casual theft. Sympathy’s there for a reason; if I didn’t have the instinct I’d still be able to solve social coordination problems, but I’d be missing a heuristic that’d allow me to do it much faster in the 80% case. My impression is that that would cause more problems than it’s likely to solve, given that I’m not in a field like law or business where sociopathy would give me a direct comparative advantage.
I’d probably take a pill that reduced my sympathetic instincts rather than eliminating them entirely, though, or allowed me to selectively disable them. I’ve got the feeling that they’re more than optimally active in my particular case.